While most IT security professionals are well aware of the nature of cyber threats, many lack the predictive insights to pre-emptively do anything about new threats. Addressing that issue usually means turning to vendors who have proven expertise in the infosec domain.

Paradoxically, here in early 2016, we are witnessing the lowest U.S. gas prices in years, but we are also moving toward a transportation era based on dramatically different economic premises, most obviously driverless vehicles. So it seems a perfect time to dig into the deep economics of cars, their impacts on city life, and what we can anticipate coming down the pike with the rise of driverless vehicles and smarter ways of living in cities once we can depend on AI-augmented transport.

2016 is the year many thought leaders in tech space are urging caution, expecting markets to cool drastically and urging startups to stay afloat by minimizing burn rate. Yet at the same time, the hardware industry is the fastest growing sector in the market, with investment up 30x since 2010.

At this important precipice, what does the future hold for hardware companies?

There’s a soul-crushing moment in The Iron Giant when [spoiler alert] the alien robot chooses to save humans from an atomic bomb. The 1968 story by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes presents one of the archetypal intersections of technology and humanity. It was science fiction then but, in the near fifty years that have since passed, the delta between tech and humans has narrowed. Today we live in a world where technology is closing in on what may be our most complex asset: emotion. And while the long-term impact unleashes a provocative range of possibilities, the more immediate effects are starting to be seen in customer engagement.

Mobile technology has come incredibly far over the past few years, from smartphones and tablet computers being a luxury to becoming an essential tool for the enterprise, fundamentally changing how we do business. This transformation provided the backdrop for Gigaom’s recent Webinar Evolving Enterprise Security for the Mobile-First World.

The tech world is in many ways like a large city. While we spend most of our time in a few neighborhoods, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to encounter an old friend or colleague that you haven’t talked to in years, hanging out in your corner café. So I was not surprised to hear that my old friend Antony Brydon had started a new company with a compelling value proposition, called Directly, and that he and his head of marketing, Lynda Radosevich, thought I’d like to learn about it.

Screens, it seems, are everywhere these days. Printers and watches, tablets and smartphones all have high-resolution digital displays; front rooms and shared spaces across the globe are being furnished with increasingly large monitors. It’s a consequence of the relationship between increasing fabrication quality and falling prices, reducing what might be called the ‘threshold of suitability’ – simply put, the point at which deploying a screen becomes cost effective.

While the 1992 film Toys, starring the late, great Robin Williams, did not meet with universal acclaim (it registered a paltry 26% at the review site Rotten Tomatoes, despite receiving two Oscar nominations for its artistic merit), it contained at least one notable scene. This involved Williams, as toy designer Leslie Zevo, sitting on a sofa with his sister Alsatia (played by Joan Cusack) and wearing what looked like eye masks. As the pair rocked, screamed and waved their hands in the air it became clear that they were watching a roller coaster simulation.

Spot the date: over a quarter of a century has now passed since virtual reality (VR) headsets first entered the popular consciousness. A number of challenges have had to be overcome — not least insufficient screen resolution and movement tracking, which have been considered as causes of queasiness when headsets are worn.

The benefits of using the cloud are undeniable—from reduced infrastructure costs and license fees to increased scalability and agility. But, while every company has some variation of a cloud strategy on their roadmap, the move to the cloud is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. Most often, it’s a gradual implementation because some processes must still run on-premises or in a private cloud, while others can more easily and compliantly be supported in the public cloud.

Social networks are the overworked writer’s best friend. It’s easy to observe the latest outrage on Twitter, grab a few good jokes from Reddit, or screen cap the ridiculous things people write on Facebook and turn them into blog posts. Writers used to have to find stories to chase — now they just have to be willing to sift through gargantuan masses of shit to find a few nuggets of social media gold.

3D printing technology has made a lot of advancements lately, prompting people to create more useful objects. People have always dreamed about being able to select a car online, download a design, and print it in the privacy of their own home. That dream is quickly becoming a reality thanks to developments from Local Motors. Innovative technology has made it possible for the car manufacturer to create the world’s first ever working 3D-printed vehicle.

Now is the winter of tech companies’ discontent. By that I mean December is fast becoming the time of the year for tech companies to shutter apps and services that haven’t quite made their mark.

Most recently, LinkedIn has decided to fully discontinue its Pulse News reader application, which it first acquired back in 2013, on December 31. The move isn’t very surprising, considering that the company launched a completely overhauled version of Pulse (officially called LinkedIn Pulse) back in September that doesn’t look much at all like the old service.

Until recently, the only activity tracking I was really doing was through the Health app on my iPhone. I write about wearables from time to time, and have dabbled in the tracking universe, but never felt the need to commit to any one device for personal use. That said, the time I spent with Moov’s new Moov Now device provided me with clarity and flexibility in my workouts and daily activity that I haven’t experienced with other wearables.

For the past two decades, the web has been optimized for sight and touch. This is about to change in a big way. Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and the Amazon Echo are ushering in an era of voice-controlled devices and services. Soon, Facebook M will join the fray. These digital assistants all reveal the beginnings of a transformation within the Internet. We will increasingly interact with the web and all it contains primarily using our voice.

Unless you’ve been camping out under a rock for the last decade, you probably know that we’re totally destroying the Earth. We of wanton use of fossil fuels and reluctance to buy into change en masse are driving the single biggest crisis that faces our planet, and the folks behind the just-announced NRG COSIA Carbon Xprize are looking to help save us from ourselves.

“Highly unlikely” would probably be how you’d have responded a year ago to someone telling you two of the largest tech companies in the world — Apple and Google — would both try to fix mobile advertising by blocking ads, but that’s currently the case.